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Blue eyes have a common ancestor 

From PhysOrg, via Fairyshaman:

Blue-eyed humans have a single, common ancestor

New research shows that people with blue eyes have a single, common ancestor. A team at the University of Copenhagen have tracked down a genetic mutation which took place 6-10,000 years ago and is the cause of the eye colour of all blue-eyed humans alive on the planet today.

A pill for everything 

From an article on a study that shows women display increased hormone levels when exposed to chemicals found in male sweat:

One implication of the finding is that there may be better ways to raise cortisol levels in patients with diseases such as Addison's disease, which is characterized by low cortisol. Instead of giving the hormone in pill form, which has side effects such as ulcers and weight gain, "a potential therapeutic mechanism whereby merely smelling synthesized or purified human chemosignals may be used to modify endocrine balance," the authors wrote.

How distinctly American, distilling sex into pill form so we can have the benefits without all the messy side effects... (thanks to Janie for the link.)

Origami lens 

Via PhysOrg:

Engineers at UC San Diego have built a powerful yet ultrathin digital camera by folding up the telephoto lens. This technology may yield lightweight, ultrathin, high resolution miniature cameras for unmanned surveillance aircraft, cell phones and infrared night vision applications....

Instead of bending and focusing light as it passes through a series of separate mirrors and lenses, the new folded system bends and focuses light while it is reflected back and forth inside a single 5 millimeter thick optical crystal. The light is focused as if it were moving through a traditional lens system that is at least seven times thicker.

"When all is said and done, our camera will look a lot like a lens cap that can be focused and used as a regular camera," said Ford.

Their paper is in the latest issue of Applied Optics. (Thanks to Janie for the link!)

Accidental discovery of magnetic organic molecules 

From a SciAm article on the discovery of new magnetic organic molecules:

The discovery was partly accidental. The researchers were mixing organic nitrogen-rich compounds with nickel atoms and water. Normally during s uch reactions, multiple organic molecules will attach to each metal ion, so a relatively small amount of nickel should have been needed. But Hicks says his postdoc, Rajsapan Jain, noticed that the chemicals were not completely used up in the reaction, so they kept adding nickel to see what would happen. They ended up with a mudlike powder in their test tubes.

To quote Isaac Asimov: "The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!) but 'That's funny ...'"

Best science blog posts of 2006 

After going through hundreds of nominations and reviews, Bora Coturnix has collected a list of the top 50 science blog posts of 2006 (also to be published in an ink-on-dead-trees anthology). Great summaries of the latest science translated for the layman — check it out! (And thanks to Janie for the link!)

Randi Foundation changing $1M challenge rules 

Wired reports that the James Randi Educational Foundation is changing the rules for its million-dollar cash prize to anyone who can perform a psychic or supernatural ability under controlled conditions, to better focus on high-profile charlatans and spend less time testing people with obvious schizophrenia or other delusions. As of April 1st, if you want to apply for the prize you need to have some sort of media profile about their power and a letter from an academic who has seen their ability. (Thanks to Janie for the link!)

When do we choke under pressure? 

Cognitive Daily has a nice summary of a study showing that people tend to choke under pressure on tasks that use your working memory, but actually do better under pressure on so-called information-integration tasks that require less working memory.

Evolution and the Samurai Crab 

I wasn't planning on posting anything for the Carl Sagan blog-a-thon marking the 10th anniversary of his death, but as it happens I recently discovered something I'd always remembered from Sagan's 1978-79 TV show Cosmos was probably wrong.

I still have a mental image of Sagan sitting in a boat talking about how for millennia Japanese fishermen would throw back crabs that resembled a human face, thinking it might be the spirit of an ancient samurai. Over the years, he explained, these returned crabs bred to look even more like human faces, and the result of this unintentional artificial selection is the so-called samurai crabs, which bear a striking resemblance to the face of a samurai.

It's a great story which has been around at least since a 1952 Life Magazine article by evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley. But according to a 1993 article by crustacean evolutionary biologist Joel Martin it's almost certainly false. He points out that, though the myth that the crabs in the Sea of Japan are the ghosts of defeated Heike samurai is fairly old, there are three reasons the face-like quality of the crabs can't be due to selective fishing:

1. Many crabs look like human faces, whether or not they are from the Sea of Japan or in regularly fished waters. The grooves that make the outline of the face are caused by supportive ridges that serve as sites for muscle attachments.

2. Fossils of crabs closely related to the samurai crab also resemble human faces, even though they predate man's appearance on earth.

3. Most damning of all, the fishermen who make their living from the Sea of Japan don't eat any of the samurai crab regardless of what they look like: they don't grow any bigger than 1.2 inches across the back, so fishermen always just throw them back (or rather, they never bother to retrieve them from their nets in the first place).

It's a shame that the story of unintentional artificial selection isn't true, because it really is a great teaching story about evolution. The fact that I still remembered it enough to go searching on Wikipedia for "samurai crab" 27 years after I saw the original program may be the best testament to Carl Sagan I can give.

How your body processes soda 

Via Healthbolt, how your body processes Coke or any other sugary caffeinated soda. I'm interested in seeing the citations, which the author promises he'll link to. (Thanks to Aaron for the link!)

Earliest sunset of the year 

A bit of trivia: even though the Winter Solstice isn't for another couple weeks, tomorrow will be the earliest sunset of the year (about 4:55 PM in San Francisco). That's because even though the days will keep getting shorter until December 22nd, sunrise will be getting later even faster.

(Calculated over at Express Tech's Sunrise and Sunset Calculator, which is only one I could find that includes seconds.)

Pieces of pi at Washington Park Station 

I was in the Washington Park MAX Station in Portland yesterday, which includes a core sample taken during the tunnel's construction along with a 16-million-year timeline showing when each sample had been at the Earth's surface. Etched into the wall along the timeline include technical and mathematical discoveries, including 107 digits of pi. Only, I noticed as I read through the digits, it's wrong. The first row is correct, but the rest looks random. My friend and I speculated on our ride back why that might be. Was it an estimate, the result of calculating only the first several terms of an infinite series? A deliberate retelling of an historically significant blunder? A secret code left by the artist that translates to "help, I'm being held captive in a Portland artist colony!"?

Google to the rescue, it turns out this was either a clever way of representing the first 1000 digits of pi, or more likely was a simple misreading of the reference book from which the number came. As Mark Cowan points out in Underground Pi, the numbers etched in stone in the subway were taken from A History of Pi, which prints the digits in rows of 10 groups of 10 digits. The artist clearly took his numbers from the first column in that reference, thus printing the first thru tenth fractional digits, the 101th-110th, etc.

What does cloning do to the stem-cell debate? 

OK, so the whole stem-cell debate in congress mostly revolves around the fac that, as Bush put it, "...extracting the stem cell destroys the embryo, and thus destroys its potential for life,” and opponents of embryonic stem-cell research suggest scientists should focus on adult stem cells that don't have that potential. Which just makes me wonder, what happens if (or when) science advances to the point where human cloning is possible? Would adult stem cells be verboten as well? What happens when blood cells and dead skin have the "potential for life?"

Singing sands 

OK, this is too cool. From Physics News Update (with thanks to Strata for the link):

For centuries, world travelers have known of sand dunes that issue loud sounds, sometimes of great tonal quality. In the 12th century Marco Polo heard singing sand in China and Charles Darwin described the clear sounds coming from a sand deposit up against a mountain in Chile. Now, a team of scientists has disproved the long held belief that the sound comes from vibrations of the dune as a whole and proven, through field studies and through controlled experiments in a lab, that the sounds come from the synchronized motions of the grains in avalanches of a certain size.

You can hear recordings of singing avalanches from CNRS labs, and Prof. Melany Hunt at caltech has some movies of creating singing avalanches on her website.

Deb Roy on Morning Edition 

NPR's Morning Edition has a nice piece on Media Lab Prof. Deb Roy and his language-learning robot Ripley, a part of their series this week on exploring language.

EIT on a chip 

From this month's Nature (if you don't feel like registering, try one of these):

A two-laser trick that renders opaque media transparent can be achieved in systems of tiny optical resonators — with potentially profound consequences for optical communication and information processing.

The discovery of electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) — an unusual effect that occurs when two laser beams interact within an optical material — and the use of novel techniques to fabricate ever smaller structures to control light have been recent exciting developments in optical physics. Writing in Physical Review Letters, Xu et al. neatly combine the two, demonstrating an on-chip, all-optical analogue of EIT based on the response of coupled optical microresonators. The result may open up untrodden pathways in photonics, offering prospects of smaller, more efficient devices for the manipulation and transmission of light.

(Thanks to eLMo for the link!)

World's largest collection of baby home movies 

Professor Deb Roy at the MIT Media Lab has launched what sounds to me like the biggest "record absolutely everything" type project to date. He and his wife had their first child nine months ago, and have outfitted their home with 11 ceiling-mounted omni-directional cameras, 14 microphones and a 5-terabyte disk cache in the basement to record all their daily interactions with their new son. (As you might expect, they've also got several systems in place to maintain privacy, including easy-to-access off and erase buttons.)

Previous projects of this nature have been designed with the eventual goal of becoming memory aids (notably EuroPARC's Forget-Me-Not, Ricoh Innovation's Infinite Memory Multifunction Machine, and Microsoft BARC's MyLifeBits), as training data for context-aware applications (Brian Clarkson's Life Patterns) or as performance art (Steve Mann's Wearable Wireless Webcam). In contrast, though Deb is interested in the memory augmentation aspects of the project, his main purpose is purely scientific — he's using this Human Speechome Project to build up a huge data bank that he can later mine to better understand how human language acquisition works:

"Just as the Human Genome Project illuminates the innate genetic code that shapes us, the Speechome project is an important first step toward creating a map of how the environment shapes human development and learning," said Frank Moss, director of the Media Lab.

...

Once at the Media Lab, the data is stored in a massive petabyte (1 million gigabyte) disk storage system donated by several companies: Bell Microproducts, Seagate Technology, Marvell and Zetera. To test hypotheses of how children learn, Roy's team will develop machine learning systems that "step into the shoes" of his son by processing the sights and sounds of three years of life at home. The effort constitutes one of the most extensive scientific analyses of long-term infant learning patterns ever undertaken.

Update 5/31/06: For more info see the paper, to be presented at the 28th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society in July.

European Space Agency measures gravitomagnetism 

I don't know enough physics to really grok how important or not this is, but man this sounds interesting:

Scientists funded by the European Space Agency have measured the gravitational equivalent of a magnetic field for the first time in a laboratory. Under certain special conditions the effect is much larger than expected from general relativity and could help physicists to make a significant step towards the long-sought-after quantum theory of gravity.

...

Small acceleration sensors placed at different locations close to the spinning superconductor, which has to be accelerated for the effect to be noticeable, recorded an acceleration field outside the superconductor that appears to be produced by gravitomagnetism. "This experiment is the gravitational analogue of Faraday's electromagnetic induction experiment in 1831.

It demonstrates that a superconductive gyroscope is capable of generating a powerful gravitomagnetic field, and is therefore the gravitational counterpart of the magnetic coil. Depending on further confirmation, this effect could form the basis for a new technological domain, which would have numerous applications in space and other high-tech sectors" says de Matos. Although just 100 millionths of the acceleration due to the Earth’s gravitational field, the measured field is a surprising one hundred million trillion times larger than Einstein’s General Relativity predicts. Initially, the researchers were reluctant to believe their own results.

(Via /. via Kurt.)

When everyone on the team is a rocket scientist... 

The European Space Agency & Australian National University just announced a new type of ion engine that has four times the efficiency of previous engines. That's pretty cool, but the part of the story that really impressed me was this:

The new experimental engine, called the Dual-Stage 4-Grid (DS4G) ion thruster, was designed and built under a contract with ESA in the extremely short time of four months by a dedicated team at the Australian National University. "The success of the DS4G prototype shows what can be achieved with the passion and drive of a capable and committed team. It was an incredible experience to work with ESA to transform such an elegant idea into a record-breaking reality", says Dr. Orson Sutherland, the engine's designer and head of the development team at the ANU.

I don't know how much technology they were able to leverage or really what's involved, but 4 months sounds really fast to go from idea to working prototype. Wow.

(Thanks to Nerfduck for the link!)

Colored Bubbles! 

Ooh! Popular Science reports on a new invention: soap to blow colored bubbles that don't stain your clothing (or the walls, or the dog):

Tim Kehoe has stained the whites of his eyes deep blue. He's also stained his face, his car, several bathtubs and a few dozen children. He's had to evacuate his family because he filled the house with noxious fumes. He's ruined every kitchen he's ever had. Kehoe, a 35-year-old toy inventor from St. Paul, Minnesota, has done all this in an effort to make real an idea he had more than 10 years ago, one he's been told repeatedly cannot be realized: a colored bubble.

(Thanks to Ricky for the link!)

Understanding science in the popular press 

Ben Goldacre's latest Guardian column Bad Science has a nice look at how journalists fail to correctly interpret scientific studies, in particular looking at a recent flap over the (lack of a) link found between autism and vaccines. His concluding advice to science journalists and presumably the rest of us:

...if you don't get it then you have only two choices: you can either learn to interpret data yourself and come to your own informed conclusions; or you decide who to trust. Choose wisely.

(By way of Mind Hacks.)

Science Fiction 

Bob Park over at What's New sums up the trouble facing those who still try to insist that global warming is just a hoax:

fiction n. Imaginative creation that does not represent truth. For weeks the news was dominated by Katrina and Rita, which drew their energy from the record warm waters of the Gulf. The news this week included satellite images of an open ocean. What made it news was that it was the Arctic Ocean, where the ice cap is rapidly shrinking. What do you do if you're Chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and you've assured people over and over that global warming is "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people"? If you're Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), you hold a full committee hearing and invite a science fiction writer to testify. Michael Crichton, author of "State of Fear," an environmental thriller in which environmentalists cook up evidence to keep federal bucks coming, was Inholfe's expert.

It must be tough for global-warming skeptics now that they can't find who actually has credentials in the field to back their side. (If only they'd prepared ahead of time like the New-Earth Creationists did, and started their own "degree" programs...)

What is scientific data? 

Q: What is scientific data? A: Whatever the Secretary of the Interior says it is.

At least that'll be the case if congress passes HR 3824, now headed for the floor of the House. From the bill:

The term `best available scientific data' means scientific data, regardless of source, that are available to the Secretary at the time of a decision or action for which such data are required by this Act and that the Secretary determines are the most accurate, reliable, and relevant for use in that decision or action.

Given that this administration defines "best available scientific data" as "that data that supports the president's life-in-a-bubble view of reality," as a political appointee the Secretary of the Interior is probably far more qualified to judge the scientific merit of a study than any scientist.

Head Box Study 

It's experiments like this that make being a scientist all worthwhile (thanks to Bandy for the link...)

Thoughts on Kurzweil's Law 

I heard Ray Kurzweil speak last night at the Long Now seminar. A friend who also attended says it was essentially the exact same talk he'd heard him give five years ago (ironic considering how fast things are supposed to be changing nowadays), but this was my first time hearing him in person. I must say it's rare where a talk makes me alternate between thinking"Well, that's completely bogus!" and "OK, that makes sense..." so many times.

Where I think he's got it right:

• People are inherently bad at extrapolating exponential trends, and we are currently experiencing technological exponential growth. This is especially true in the information and communication technologies, namely information processing, sensing and pattern-recognition, and human-to-human communications.

• Reading between the lines of his talk, information technologies are bootstrapping technologies: once you have them, they make inventing the next stage easier, faster and cheaper.

• The combination of biotech, new biological sensors and the ability to simulate complex processes are going to seriously challenge how we currently think of ourselves as individuals and even what it means to be human.

Where I think he's got it wrong:

• As I mentioned a few days ago, I think some of his exponential curves are the result of our natural tendency to gloss over things that happened in the past and focus on recent developments. (A less generous assessment would say he just did it to make his curve work out, but this isn't limited to Ray's charts; in fact, he showed the same graph with points plotted from other lists of momentous inventions drawn from various encyclopedia.) This is not to say there aren't several exponential growth curves in play at the moment, but I don't think this is a trend that has been going on for hundreds of thousands of years.

• It's an old saw that people overestimate what will be possible in five years and underestimate what will be possible in 20 years. I think his predictions of ubiquitous augmented reality, computers distributed throughout one's clothing, and head-up display contact lenses (or direct-to retina/optic nerve) will all happen at some point, but not in the next 5 years.

• Ray talks about the creation of artificial intelligences as if some day in the near future we'll invent HAL and start talking to it. Ever since Alan Turing described the Turing Test, people have described artificial intelligences in terms of ability to generate and understand language, ability to make human-like decisions, ability to show and understand emotion — in other words, the ability to relate to humans. I see no reason to think the first AIs will think or communicate like us at all, nor do I think they will exist at human scale.

  In fact, I would say several species of human-made hyper-intelligences already walk among us: we call them corporations, nation-states, philosophical or political movements, and civilizations. Their neurons are the people, documents and cognitive artifacts that make up the whole. Their synapses are the communication and social networks that run between these individuals. The specific structure of the intelligence is set by its laws, traditions and culture.

  The dual of the idea that groups of people, documents and cognitive artifacts can be a single intelligence is the idea that my own human intelligence, as an individual, is actually made up of more than just what I can think when I'm lying naked and alone. As Edwin Hutchins points out in Cognition in the Wild, human intelligence is not just the product of what's inside our skull but stems from the combination of our brains, our culture, and tools such as the paper we write on and the skill of writing itself. I expect by the time a machine with no human in the loop has passed the Turing Test, the continuing augmentation of humans will have long-since forced us to recognize that the test wasn't all that good a criterion for intelligence in the first place.

• Even though our knowledge and our information technologies are improving exponentially in many fields, there are some parts of human knowledge that are not growing at this incredible rate. Notably, our understanding of existential questions about the purpose of life, what we as humans value, and the meaning of free will and have not kept apace with technology — even though in many cases new technology and new understandings about the world have pulled the rug out of our previous answers. These questions will become especially important as we start fundamentally modifying our biology and finally unravel the mysteries of the mind itself.

The Singularity is near now? 

Kevin Drum over at the Washington Monthly has a nice extrapolation based on Ray Kurzweil's new book (see his chart for added effect):

With that said, however, it turns out that I do have a bone to pick with Kurzweil over one of the trend charts that litter his book. Basically, he argues that the pace of change has been accelerating over time, so that major inventions are being created ever faster as time goes by. 10,000 years ago it took several thousand years between major inventions (agriculture --> wheel), while a century ago it took only a few decades (telephone --> radio).

Fine. But his cleverly constructed chart cheats: it stops about 30 years ago. So I decided to extend it. My version of his chart extends to last month (see pink shaded area), and it indicates that major, paradigm-busting inventions should be spaced about a week apart these days.

...

So what gives? Seems to me that the Singularity should be right on our doorstep, not 40 years away. And while 40 years may not seem like all that much in the great scheme of things, it means a lot if you're 46 years old. Which I am.

So what happened?

If I had to guess without having read the book yet, I'd say what the chart really shows is the gloss of history: the longer ago something was, the less important we take it to be and the more we lump it together with everything else from that period. For example, the last four entries on Ray's chart are the Industrial Revolution, the Telephone, electricity, and radio (as one event), the computer and the personal computer (as two events). Why did he decide to label these as four paradigm-busting inventions rather than seven, or as one? Contrarily, why are writing and the wheel lumped into the same invention, or printing and the experimental method? Depending on what you call a single "event" the spacing between those events could show accelerating change, constant change, or stability punctuated by short periods of rapid change (the last one being my own personal belief).

Could the one true constant be the belief that our generation is experiencing more change than any other?

Books on modern physics for the layman 

I've always been fascinated by modern physics, but too often explanations in physics books either (a) give simplified explanations that don't hold up under closer scrutiny, or (b) use so much specialized vocabulary and mathematics that they might as well be in Greek. The following four books are the ones I've found to be well-written exceptions:

• The Einstein Paradox, and other science mysteries solved by Sherlock Holmes, by Colin Bruce, Perseus Books, 1997. Bruce presents 12 new short stories staring Sherlock Holmes as he solves cases that loosely follow the progress of physics through the last century, from a case of a mysterious sniper on a train (explaining Einstein's Relativity) to one of the best descriptions of the EPR paradox I've seen in a case involving gambling fraud.

• QED: The Strange Thory of Light and Matter, by Richard Feynman, Princeton University Press, 1985. Feynman was a brilliant teacher as well as physicist, and here he beautifully explains quantum electrodynamics, the theory that won him a Nobel prize. Based on a series of lectures he gave at UCLA that were designed specifically for a nontechnical audience.

• In Search of Schroginger's Cat and the sequel Schrodinger's Kittens and the Search for Reality: Solving the Quantum Mysteries, both by John Gribbin (1984 and 1995). While I didn't get quite as much understanding out of these books as I did from the first two I listed (there was a bit too much hand-waving for my taste), they still lay a good foundation and cover a wide field of the bizarreness that is quantum physics.

Science is hard, let's go shopping! 

There's a debate going on over at The Edge about the role of common sense in science, especially physics and cognitive science. John Horgan is the science journalist who started the debate with a NYT op-ed:

[String theory and the idea of parallel universes] are preposterous, but that's not my problem with them. My problem is that no conceivable experiment can confirm the theories, as most proponents reluctantly acknowledge. The strings (or membranes, or whatever) are too small to be discerned by any buildable instrument, and the parallel universes are too distant. Common sense thus persuades me that these avenues of speculation will turn out to be dead ends.

Common sense — and a little historical perspective — makes me equally skeptical of grand unified theories of the human mind. After a half-century of observing myself and my fellow humans — not to mention watching lots of TV and movies — I've concluded that as individuals we're pretty complex, variable, unpredictable creatures, whose personalities can be affected by a vast range of factors. I'm thus leery of hypotheses that trace some important aspect of our behavior to a single cause.

He later responds to comments with:

The question that I raised — and that all these respondents have studiously avoided — is what we should do when presented with theories such as psychoanalysis or string theory, which are not only counterintuitive but also lacking in evidence. Common sense tells me that in these cases common sense can come in handy.

As I see it, Horgan is mistaking lack of differentiation for lack of evidence. Unlike the so-called theory of Intelligent Design, String Theory and the Parallel Universes interpretation of quantum physics have a great deal of predictive power and evidence behind them. The problem is that (currently) this is the exact same set of evidence that supports quantum theory in general, so there's no way to say that one interpretation is better than the other. However, if we found evidence that our understanding of quantum theory was fundamentally wrong, the other two theories would also be out the window.

Horgan is also wrong about why these theories are so non-sensical. The reason is not, as he implies, that scientists mistake preposterousness for profundity, nor is it that they just like making fun of English majors like himself. As Stanford professor Susskind points out in the debate, the reason these theories violate our common sense is that the world violates our common sense as soon as we look outside of our comfort zone. No theory that fits the experimental evidence will satisfy our common-sense understanding because the evidence itself fails to do so.

(Props to Mind Hacks for the link.)

Intelligent Design 

Intelligent Design has two key arguments:

1. Evolution is not enough to explain the biological and chemical complexity found in living beings.
2. A reasonable hypothesis is that life was created by some "intelligence."

The first argument has been addressed by a number of people, but it seems like the second argument has been largely dismissed since (just like Creationism or the Flying Spaghetti Monster theory) it doesn't have predictive power and thus is a gut-feel rhetorical argument rather than a scientific theory. I think it should be dismissed on those grounds when it comes to science classes, but what surprises me is how silly the rhetorical argument is as well.

Consider: Intelligent Design claims that life is so complex that it must have been designed by an intelligence, even though:

• The best known example of intelligence, namely man, is still woefully incapable of producing such a complex system.
• When it comes to "designing" a biological system, the way we humans perform anything more major than a simple tweak is by evolving the new traits, be it by breeding dogs or in a petrie dish.
• There's not even agreement on what the word "intelligence" means beyond the fact that (most) humans posses the trait.

Given these rhetorical holes, I have to wonder whether the real reason Intelligent Design proponents feel something so complex must have been designed by an intelligence is because emotionally they've already assumed the reverse, namely that any system able to produce something so complex must in its own right be intelligent.

If so, then in a way Intelligent Design proponents are correct: there is an intelligence that designed life. That intelligence is the distributed system of naturally occurring patterns of reproduction, natural selection and genetic drift that we call evolution.

Kennedy on the vaccine/autism link 

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has a good overview on the potential link between mercury-based preservatives used in vaccines from 1981 to 2003 and the simultaneous huge increase in autism. I'd sort of bunched this theory in with fluoridation paranoia, but it looks like there's a lot of concern among level-headed people who have looked at the data and have the expertise to understand it. If what this article implies is accurate, this whole thing could blow into another Thalidomide.

Acupuncture good for migraines — and so is random poking with needles 

A study published last week in the Journal of the American Medical Association compared the effectiveness of acupuncture as a treatment for migraine headaches against "sham acupuncture" where the doctors used needles at non-acupuncture points. The results of the two groups were virtually identical: a 2.2-day reduction in the number of days with moderate or severe headaches in a four-week period. That's significantly better than the 0.8-day reduction for the control "waiting list" group that got no treatment, but begs the obvious question: why spend years studying acupuncture if needle location doesn't really matter?

As a side note, I'm too cheap to pay the $12 to to download the full paper, but there's a nice breakdown of the study at the UK National electronic Library for Health. (Thanks to Bob Park's What's New for the link!)

Self replicating robot 

image courtesy Cornell University

Cornell Researchers Viktor Zykov, Efstathios Mytilinaios, Bryant Adams, and Hod Lipson have built a self-replicating robot (video). The robot itself is just a basic proof-of-concept — their real contribution is how they try to redefine the whole concept of self-replication from being a "you either have it or you don't" binary property to being a continuum. From their FAQ:

Contrary to previously held views that self-replication is a property that a system either has or has not ("you can't be half pregnant"), our theory suggests that it is actually a continuum, where different systems can self-reproduce to different extents. The extent to which a system is self replicating depends on things like how fast does it self replicate, how accurately does it self replicate, how dependent is it on its environment to self replicate, how complex are its building blocks, how complex it is itself, etc. etc. For example, crystals self replicate, but only in a solution; rabbits self-replicate - less accurately and more slowly than a crystal - but they are less dependent on having a specific environment.

Build your own cloud chamber! 

Nothing to do on a rainy saturday? Build your own cloud chamber!

How do you tell when you're being spun? 

An two-year-old speech by Michael Crichton that came across a mailing list I'm on slams scientists for being "seduced by the... lures of politics and publicity," bringing its skepticism to bear on the growing scientific consensus on global warming. One person on the list asked the obvious question after reading it, namely who is the layman to trust?

My response was that it's not really that hard (though I should have added it's a skill that needs to be learned).

Start by being skeptical of anyone who wears being a lone skeptic against a vast sea of consensus as a badge of honor, especially when he's not an expert in the field he's criticizing. One in a million really is the genius he thinks he is, but most of the time there's a good reason everyone else thinks he's full of it. Then be doubly suspicious of any explanation of an idea or study given by someone who opposes it. (I'm reminded of a born-again Baptist friend of mine in high school who kept trying to explain to my Catholic girlfriend what "Catholics believe" — as described in some Catholic-bashing pamphlet her church was handing out.)

Next, see what parts of what they're saying you do know something about, or can find out through a quick Web search. I can't speak to everything Crichton's complaining about, but I do know he's wrong that SETI isn't science (regardless of whether they're barking up the wrong tree), he's either wrong or highly selective on second-hand smoke and he's wrong when it comes to lack of scientific debate about the existence of global warming (there's been plenty of debate over the years — I gather he just doesn't like which side is coming out on top). He's also wrong in his defense of his fellow lone wolf, Lomborg. Lomborg wasn't attacked for coming to the wrong conclusions, he was attacked for "selective use of data, misuse of data, misinterpretations, inappropriate precision, [and] errors of fact." I'd say the fact that he was shouted down in the scientific community, in spite of economic and political pressure on his side, is a sign of something right with science. (Crichton's insinuation that Lomborg's critics don't substantiate their attacks in detail is nonsense — see the above-linked review for one of many examples.)

As a side-note, Crichton's comment that "to predict anything about the world a hundred years from now is simply absurd" is strange coming as it does from a science fiction author. It's also yet another straw-man — computer models don't make predictions, they assign probabilities based on our best guesses and based on different choices we might make. It's impossible for anyone to predict whether a fire will start while I sleep, but that doesn't stop me from upgrading old electrical wiring and getting fire insurance based on my best guess at the likelihood of a fire. Ray Bradberry once said the function of science fiction is not to predict the future, but to prevent it. In this case, that's probably a good function of science fact as well.

MIThenge 

Photo credit: Matt Yourst

In early November & late January MIT has a little local astronomical phenominon known as MIThenge, when the sun shines directly down the 825-foot infinite corridor that forms the spine of main campus. This year's convergence starts at around 4:49pm EST for the next few days.

I always loved this little architectural Easter egg when I was a student, but according to the MIT News Office the phenominon is likely by accident rather than design:

Historical data suggests that the solar alignment was not intended by the buildings' architects, who were more concerned with the view of the Charles River. According to a recent article in Sky & Telescope magazine, the phenomenon was noticed and publicized in the 1970s by Thomas K. Norton, a research affiliate in architecture. Students at the time did some calculations as part of a class project, and posters were put up around campus advertising a "sun set celebration."

Homeopathic remedy 

This past Sunday I was really sore from dancing for four hours after a two-and-a-half-hour intro-to-yoga class. So a friend of mine offered some homeopathic-remedy pills (Arnica). I followed the directions and took four pills under the tongue, but the next morning I was still sore.

So then I started thinking... homeopathic medicine gets stronger the more you dilute it, right? So that next morning I took just two pills — kinda like taking twice the recommended dose of ibuprophin I figured. Even that didn't seem to be enough though, so that evening I really pushed it and didn't take any of the pills. And you know what? The next morning I wasn't the least bit sore.

After that experience I'm afraid I went overboard, and started not taking all sorts of homeopathic remedies. I didn't take Belladonna for headaches, took no Allium for my allergies and even avoided Ferrum Phosphoricum to improve my stamina. So far I feel great, but to be honest I'm a little concerned. After all, there are a lot of other homeopathic remedies I'm not taking, and most of them I don't even know I'm not taking them! Could I be going too far with this? Is better living through lack of chemistry really the answer?

Walter Lewin's halo revealed 

A couple months ago, MIT physics professor Walter Lewin posted a photo of an MIT construction site to the Astronomy Picture of the Day webpage with the challenge "explain the bright ring of colors." Now after answering about 3000 answers (only 5 of them fully correct), Walter Lewin explains all.

(Note also that 75 of Prof. Lewin's lectures are available online at MIT's OpenCourseWare site, plus four more at MIT World).

TV and paying attention (to the facts) 

A couple days ago the AP reported about a new study that links the amount of time one- and three-year-olds spend watching TV to subsequent attentional problems at age seven. The study, which was published in the April issue of Pediatrics, analyzed interviews from a U.S. Department of Labor longitudinal study and found that for every extra hour a toddler watched TV per day there was a 10% rise in the likelihood that the child would show attentional problems later. The study and accompanying commentary both suggest that, while Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is known to have a significant genetic component, early television viewing might make already susceptible children more likely to manifest symptoms, and they rightly suggest further study. They also point out, however, that one "cannot draw causal inferences from these associations." For example, though most experts believe ADHD symptoms don't manifest until well after age three, it is still possible that parents are more likely to park their fidgetty children in front of the TV. Since parents of ADHD children are more likely to have attentional problems themselves, it is also possible that the results are due to parents with attentional problems being more likely to use the television as a babysitter. The article and commentary are both good science: they present their hypothesis, describe their data in detail, and point out both why they think their data supports their conclusions and how they may still be wrong. Their conclusions are well measured given the data: additional research is needed, and if the results are confirmed then attentional problems should join increased aggression and obesity as reasons to limit television viewing in early childhood.

Unfortunately, since the AP broke with the lead that television might permanently "rewire" the developing brain, most of the editorials have not been so measured. WhiteDot (an anti-TV organization) declares "It's Official: TV Linked to Attention Deficit" and presents the shocker "Are parents who use infant videos such as 'Baby Einstein' and 'Teletubbies' putting their child at risk for a lifetime of Special Ed classes, school 'behavioral therapy' and Ritalin?" The Boston Globe goes one step further, suggesting that "the passive baby sitter we let into the house turned out to be a drug dealer, altering the brain perhaps even more permanently than a bag of dope." The Philadelphia Inquirer threw in the specter that even Sesame Street might not be safe: "And it had bad news for parents who congratulate themselves that their kids watch only 'educational' TV. It didn't seem to matter what type of shows babies and toddlers watched — whether Sesame Street or Barney or Cartoon Network." (Not true — the researchers have no information about what kind of TV the children watched, and only concluded that if educational TV isn't bad then non-educational TV must be even worse to account for the differences found.)

I take away two lessons from this. First, it's likely that ADHD is yet another condition where genetics and environment interact (ala Matt Ridley's Nature via Nurture). Second, the guys writing these editorials clearly watched too much TV when they were toddlers — 'cause they just plain aren't paying attention!

References

• Early Television Exposure and Subsequent Attentional Problems in Children (Dr. Dimitri A. Christakis et. al., PEDIATRICS Vol. 113 No. 4 April 2004, pp. 708-713) [cached copy]
• Commentary: Early Television Exposure and Subsequent Attention Problems in Children (Dr. Jane Healy, PEDIATRICS Vol. 113 No. 4 April 2004, pp. 917-918) [cached copy]
• Study links TV, children's attention deficit: Researchers say risk rises with hours watched daily (Lindsey Tanner, Associated Press, 5 April 2004)
• It's Official: TV Linked to Attention Deficit (Jean Lotus, WhiteDot, April 2004)
• Kids, TV and the risk of attention problems (Derrick Z. Jackson, The Boston Globe, 7 April 2004)
• Kids, TV and ADHD: Pay attention to this (The Philadelphia Inquirer, 11 April 2004)

Science of marriage 

This American Life had a fascinating show on marriage a couple weeks back (and have made an audio stream available). Most interesting was an interview (in act one) with Dr. John Gottman, a researcher who videotapes & bio-monitors couples discussing something they disagree about and codes their heart rates, expressions and how they speak to each other. From about 15 minutes of data he has an 85% chance of predicting if the marriage will last the next 4 years and whether they'll be happy with it. If he records another hour or so of the couples talking about how they met & things they share, his success rate goes up to 94%.

News on Mars 

Well this should be interesting...

NASA will hold a press conference Tuesday to announce "significant findings" about water on Mars based on evidence from its Opportunity Mars rover.

"It's going to be the most significant science results that we've had from the rovers, and it's bearing on their primary mission," NASA spokesperson Don Savage told SPACE.com . That mission is to find signs of water that might support life.

Will the announcement change how we think about Mars?

"Anything of a significant nature has that possibility," Savage said. "Sure."

I was right. It was interesting.